Recent years have seen rapid development in digital image rendering technology. Indeed, due to advances in algorithms and hardware, conventional digital rendering systems are now able to generate high quality, photo-realistic digital images in relation to a variety of virtual environments. For example, existing systems can generate digital images of virtual environments in the context of video games, construction modeling, movies, advertising, or entertainment.
Although conventional digital rendering systems are capable of producing high-quality digital images of virtual environments, such systems also have a number of shortcomings. For example, conventional digital rendering systems take a significant amount of time and computing resources (e.g., processing power) to render digital images of virtual environments. Indeed, conventional digital rendering systems can take hours to resolve variance and generate accurate, unbiased photo-realistic digital images of a virtual environment.
The time required to synthesize digital images of virtual environments is largely controlled by the complexity of tracking light from light sources within the virtual environment. For example, to render digital images that accurately reflect light from light sources in a virtual environment, some conventional digital systems randomly cast rays from a light source. By brute force, such conventional digital systems ultimately cast rays from a light source that connect to a camera perspective and contribute to rendering the digital image.
Some other conventional digital systems seek to increase the efficiency of random ray casting by sampling rays, analyzing local features of vertices intersected by the rays, and sampling additional rays from the vertices based on the local features. Such conventional digital systems attempt to render virtual environments by tracing consecutive ray segments sequentially along vertices in a virtual environment utilizing this local information (such as illumination and material properties). This process of sequentially sampling individual ray segments from individual vertices requires an exorbitant amount of time and significant computational resources.
These and other problems exist with regard to rendering accurate, un-biased digital images of virtual environments.